


Into the Dark

by kriadydragon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Friendship, Gen, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:43:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kriadydragon/pseuds/kriadydragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin is a medium with a past he can't (and may not want to)<br/>remember. Arthur is a ghost hunter looking for answers as to why his<br/>mother killed herself for no known reasons. Both are rivals, but will<br/>have to work together when their quest for answers gets them more than<br/>they bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Merlin Horror 2013 for prompt #13 - Arthur is the head of a paranormal investigation team. Merlin is a medium who sees dead people (and it sometimes drives him crazy). And they're both each other's rivals. But when they're both hired by the rich and famous Mithian (or who ever you want) - who swears her aunt's old mansion is trying to kill people - they have no choice but to work together if they want to survive.
> 
> Warnings: Mentions of past experimentation on children, death of children, death of a minor character (but no one we really care about ;)) and gruesome though non-explicit imagery. And while I stuck with most of the prompt, most of my idea decided it wanted to go in another direction.

Merlin often dreamed of darkness. They were very vivid dreams, sometimes. The kind of dreams people weren’t supposed to have, full of sounds and smells and sensations that would stay with Merlin even minutes after he woke, as though parts of the dream had followed him into reality.

Such as the screaming. 

It wasn’t often he had the dream where the darkness was so thick he couldn’t see, but he could still feel, and what he felt was a cold, cramped space. A tunnel, not one made of rock, but made of smooth metal that popped and rumbled when he crawled over it. He moved quickly, running on his elbows and knees, his breathing fast and sharp in his ears and his heartbeat like thunder. He never wondered why he was in the cave, because “why” didn’t matter. There was a “why,” even if he didn’t remember what the “why” was. The “why” could wait, because all that mattered was moving as quickly as possible and reaching the end before he was discovered. He had to hurry, because…

Merlin woke, as he often did when dreaming about the tunnel, with a gasp, a thundering heart and the air cold and close like metal walls. He was drenched in sweat, and he kicked off his covers to cool down as he lay in the safety of his own bed, his own room with his own things, and breathed while listening to the gentle murmurs of the TV in the living room.  
It took Merlin a moment to realize that what he was hearing couldn’t be the television. Not when one of the voices belonged to Uncle Gaius.

“Your son has always been passionate in his pursuit of the unknown and unexplained, Uther. Your own pursuits to stop him have been futile. Let the boy have his chase, I say.”

“Not this time, Gaius, I can’t. At least with his other… projects,” Uther said the word as though it were something foul, “he was paid well for his discoveries. But this personal project has been consuming him.”

“I’m not surprised,” Gaius said. “He’s finally come across evidence that his mother’s fevered dreams may have been more than dreams after all. You can deny it all you wish, Uther, but your wife was indeed haunted by something. Whether it was a matter of having a sixth sense or some dark secret buried deep within her subconscious, we may never know. But something drove her to kill herself, something no doctor or psychologist could explain. Healthy young women are not sane one day then mad the next without a reason. Perhaps Arthur has found that reason.”

“He has found a wild goose chase is what he’s found,” Uther snapped. “If this so-called evidence was indeed some answer then why has it led to more questions? Why does my son continue to hunt down these abandoned places when he has nothing to show for it? Please, Gaius, just allow Merlin to accompany him, just once, to prove to him that there is nothing to be found. He will listen to him.”

Gaius chuckled. “I find that to be a rather ironic sentiment, Uther. You know how Arthur feels about the boy.”

“He sees the boy as a rival, nothing more. Believe me, Gaius, I’m forever hearing my son prattling on and on about Merlin this and Merlin that. He speaks loudly of the boy being a fake but I also know Arthur has been coming to you for advice. I’ve seen case files he has studied – most of which were cases Merlin has solved. Yes, he may not like the boy but he honestly believes he has some sort of ability. Let him take Merlin along and perhaps the boy will convince him to stop this folly.”

A sigh, and a heavy one, from Gaius.

“Uther… I don’t know. Arthur can be prone to leaping without looking, and Merlin needs to be careful. Merlin has his own subconscious secrets, as you recall.”

“I do recall, Gaius. I was the one you came to when you needed help getting him out of that joke of a mental health facility. You said they were only making matters worse. I thought you said you’ve seen marked improvement in his mental state since taking him in.”

“He’s doing well, yes, but we still do not know what will trigger his memories. He’s very… I hate to use the word frail, but he is. His mind is, at least. Your son has been searching through abandoned hospitals and a research facility. The last time Merlin investigated a hospital, it left him in such a state that he was unable to eat or sleep for three days.”

Merlin scowled into the dark. That had been over four years ago when he’d still been getting the hang of his gifts. He was stronger now, and bloody-well hated it whenever Gaius still referred to him as “frail.”

“Please, Gaius. I don’t know what else to do. This obsession will be his downfall, I know it.”

Another long, breathy sigh. “At least let Merlin be the one to decide. I’ll ask him in the morning. But if he says no, then that’s the end of the matter.”

“Of course, Gaius.”

The house fell quiet save for the creak of floorboards and the sound of the door opening and closing. 

Merlin lifted his head and stared into the blue-black darkness, toward the corner of his room, and the pale little girl in the white shift standing there, staring at him. 

“What do you think?” he asked. “Should I help the pompous, overbearing prat?”

The girl nodded her head. Merlin cocked an eyebrow.

“Then yes it is,” he said.

~oOo~

Once upon a time, Merlin had lost an entire year of his life. He’d been five, and had gone to play with Will. Then he woke up in a hospital thin and bruised with two round burns on the side of his skull and what looked to be needle punctures up and down his arms. He was also six instead of five. His mother had simply been happy to have him home, the authorities more interested in finding out what had happened than his well-being, and Merlin had been terrified. He’d been too young and too trusting to realize that being in the mental hospital hadn’t been to help him, but so that the doctors could make him remember.

All Merlin could remember was the dark, pain, screaming, and the metal cave. At one point, the attempts to make him remember were so bad he blacked out, and two days later woke up at home with his mother and Gaius. 

And man with a bloody face, and a woman with a bloody chest. 

It was terrifying, since seeing things that only he could see would be terrifying. But Gaius was a man of science who didn’t limit himself to only what he could see, feel and touch. He was more interested in what he couldn’t explain than what he could explain. He knew what it was that Merlin was seeing.

Merlin had wandered into the woods to play with a friend, then woke up able to see dead people.

Which was fine, really, once he got used to it. Then he rather liked it when he found out that seeing the dead could also mean helping the dead, and it felt good to help something so lost and terrified as he himself had been. It made what happened to him, whatever it was, something he no longer had to worry about.

Except for the dreams, and the memories that seemed to attack him for no reason. He hated the memories that told him nothing, that made him wake sweat-drenched and with a scream caught in his throat. And he never remembered anything, except for the cold, the dark, the pain, the scream…

And that he hadn’t been alone.

~oOo~

“Igraine Pendragon was not insane, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” Gaius said. They were driving down a country road enclosed on either side by a tall wall of trees, like a corridor with no end in sight. Gaius was behind the wheel, and Merlin in the passenger seat, giving the files he had read the other day another quick run-through.

“She had a gift,” Gaius said. Then he hummed, “Not a strong one, not like yours, but she had a way of sensing things. She also had a brother, Agravaine – bit of a black sheep, although he did quite well for himself for a time. He did medical research, and had a deep interest in studying the unused parts of the human brain, I believe. The details are a bit sketchy, I’m afraid, since what I know I know from what Igraine told Uther and Agravaine felt inclined to tell Igraine. Then he disappeared. It was six years later that Igraine seemed to lose her mind. She would keep screaming about her brother, asking him why, and that was about all she said that made any sense. The next day, she hung herself.”

Merlin grimaced sympathetically. The file Gaius had given him was full of copied forms based on the notes and research Arthur had shared with Gaius. Because while Uther was certain that Arthur’s search for the truth was nothing more than a grief-fueled obsession, Gaius believed there was something to it. The abandoned hospital, the empty office building said to have been a research center – they were all places where Agravaine had worked. 

“They were twins as well, you know,” Gaius went on. “Igraine and Agravaine. Fraternal twins, although Igraine was nothing like her brother. I theorize, though, that they must have had some kind of connection, and that something happened to Agravaine that effected Igraine so terribly that she could not cope.”

“Were they close?” Merlin asked.

“Not particularly. But as I said, Igraine was gifted. It stood to reasons Agravaine was gifted as well. Whatever happened… lords it must have been awful to drive Igraine to do what she did, and so quickly.” 

Gaius fell quiet for a moment, his face pensive and sad. “I was the one to sedate her,” he said. “Her madness kept getting worse. It was after midnight. Uther had hoped that a good night’s sleep might calm her but we had talked of having her committed in the morning, to play it safe. Uther found her when he went in to wake her.”

“That’s horrible,” Merlin said with a shudder. There’d been a time in his life, when the dreams and the fractured memories would be so bad that death seemed the preferable answer to his misery. It had never reached the point of him actually contemplating killing himself, but it was bad enough that the thought of his own death had become a comfortable concept.  
Gaius nodded sagely, then turned a stern look on Merlin. “Don’t let Arthur know I told you all this. Everything I know of the matter I was told in confidence and I’m only telling you so that you can aid Arthur in his search. 

Merlin glowered at Gaius. “What, you think I’m going to hold this over his head or something? Gaius, I would never do something like that, not even to Arthur, even if he is an arse.”

Gaius gave him a disapproving look, which Merlin mostly ignored. He looked back down at the research file and furrowed his brow in concentration.

“None of these locations showed any indication of being haunted,” Merlin said. “What in them led Arthur to this current location?”

Gaius chuffed. “Apparently dumb luck. He found a file, of all things, hidden beneath some old rotting boxes. It only had a single sheet of paper with most of the words blacked out, but it had coordinates. An old bunker, and one even open to the public. But I suppose it is said that the best place to hide something is in plain sight.”

“Finding some random file with some random location sounds a bit convenient,” Merlin said. 

“Perhaps,” Gaius said, noncommittal. “Perhaps not. Arthur kept telling me that he felt like he was meant to find these places. Perhaps he is being guided. And that, my boy, is where you will be needed should he find more than he bargained for. If Agravaine did indeed meet some fate terrible enough to form a connection that unhinged his sister, then there could be a very powerful residue of psychic energy where ever this incident took place. If you so much as sense any negative energy then you need to leave and make sure that Arthur goes with you.”

Merlin pressed his lips to hold back a grimace. 

The bunker was obviously a tourist destination only for the most adventurous. It wasn’t only out in the middle of nowhere, it was located deep in the woods, and if you didn’t already know where to find it then good luck stumbling onto it. Gaius eventually pulled off the road and into the trees, where a few shallow tire ruts marked where past cars had come to park while their owners searched for the bunker. Merlin could just see another car – cherry red and probably costing more than Gaius made in three years – parked deeper in and nearly out of sight. 

The day was cool, but beneath the trees it was going on chilly. Weeds and ferns whipped at Merlin’s legs as he followed Gaius deeper into the trees, following a path set only by Gaius’ compass and his map. But soon enough all they had to do was follow the sound of murmuring voices not far ahead.

They came to the base of a hill, where the entrance of the bunker gaped like a mouth. And clustered around the entrance was Arthur and his entourage of ghost hunters. There was Morgana, who had some of her mother’s gift and a good sense when it came to determining benevolent spirits from evil ones. Gwen coordinated the cases and appointments, Percival was their tech man, and Gwaine their camera man. Leon and Elyan Merlin had no doubts were off researching the place. Elyan loved history, and while Leon loved research, he hated ghosts. 

Merlin had worked with them all, just once, but never again when he accomplished in hours what Arthur was sure should have taken days. But that was the advantage of seeing the dead. Whereas Arthur and his team relied mostly of technology, most of the time Merlin only needed his eyes and his words. 

Arthur hadn’t been happy about it.

He was even less happy to look up and see both Gaius and Merlin heading his way.

“What the hell is he doing here?” Arthur demanded.

“He’s here to help. And if you want to prove to me you have a smart head on your shoulders then you’ll accept his help without complaint,” Gaius said.

“Yeah, Arthur, be nice,” Morgana said sweetly while elbowing him in the ribs. 

Arthur crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t need his help, Gaius. This isn’t a ghost hunt and you know it.”

“But it may well turn into one. Arthur, stop being stubborn and at least let the boy accompany you. What harm could it possibly do?”

“Depends on who he talks to.”

Merlin glared at him. 

He may have also pissed off the ghost he had talked into leaving, but that spirit had already been pissed, had been looking for a reason to get more pissed, and left when Merlin managed to convince it that there was nothing left for it to get pissed about. So it wasn’t like the whole house shaking and furniture flying around was his fault.

But to Arthur it was, because anything that got a spirit riled up was reckless in his opinion - as if Arthur had never pissed off his fair share of spirits, which, according to Gaius he had. 

“Oh, Arthur, relax. It’ll be nice to have another second sight to make things go quicker,” Morgana said. “Let the kid come.”

“Yeah, let the kid come,” said Gwaine with a smirk. “He’s a lot more fun than you, especially when he starts talking to thin air.”

“Thanks, I think,” Merlin muttered.

Arthur rolled his eyes, then tossed his hands up with a grunt. “Fine, whatever, I don’t care. We’re wasting enough daylight as it is arguing about it.” But then he stomped up to Merlin and stuck his finger under his nose. “But I swear, you so much as do anything that sets us back or slows us down I will drag you out by your stupid ears.”

Merlin held his hands up in surrender while fighting a smirk. “You’re the boss in this,” he said, just to keep the peace and keep Gaius from giving them “the eyebrow.”

“You’re damn right I’m the boss, and if I tell you to jump you damn well better ask how high.” And with those vague rules establish, Arthur marched back toward the bunker entrance, grabbing a torch from a pile of them sitting in a fully unzipped backpack on the ground. 

Gwaine came over to Merlin, tossed him a torch then clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a wink. “Just stick close to me if you get scared.”

Merlin snorted. When the crap had momentarily hit the fan with that pissed-off spirit, Gwaine had hightailed it for the front door.

Gaius, about to make his way back to the car, patted Merlin on the back. “Good luck, my boy. And be careful. Arthur may not have had a spiritual encounter just yet in his search, but I feel it’s only a matter of time.”  
Merlin nodded. “I’ll get him out if things go bad, I promise.”

“Thank you,” Gaius said. “But if… things go wrong for you…”

Merlin smiled a reassuring smile. “I’ll step out for some fresh air and give you a call.”

“You do that, Merlin,” Gaius said seriously. He then made his way back to his car.

Merlin took a fortifying breath. He was quite used to doing these gigs solo, but now that he was here, watching Gaius walk away, something cold coiled tightly in his gut making him feel ever so slightly ill. He turned back to the bunker and followed Gwaine toward the entrance.

The coil tightened, his throat going suddenly dry.

“So what do you know about this place?” he asked Gwaine.

Gwaine shrugged. “Not a bloody thing. Elyan thinks it was used during World War Two to house weapons or people or something. He and Leon are still looking into it, in fact. Looks like whatever this place was used for, it was forgotten about pretty quick. They’re hoping the local village might have some info about it.”

They clicked on their torches, pushing back some of the thick darkness with circles of light. The entrance went deep, angling downward, and Merlin could just make out the others already several steps ahead. 

They past three rooms, all of them empty and their walls near-buried under graffiti. The air was cold, but moist from years of rain water having sluiced down into its depths. Soon enough their lights passed over puddles of stagnant water. 

Then they came to the end of the corridor, the way ahead blocked by rusting metal bars like a cage. There was a door, but it was bound with numerous chains and padlocks like a silent warning that to continue through was to press your own luck. 

“Well, here’s where things get illegal, folks,” Gwaine said. 

Percival, Merlin now noticed, had had a pair of bolt cutters hooked to his belt. He unhooked it and went to work on the chains. 

“It’s not like this place is officially owned by anyone,” Arthur said irritably.

“That we know of,” Gwen said like a reminder. She sighed heavily. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, now. But I still say we should replace the chains. This place might be locked up to keep people from getting lost.”

“I’m actually surprised no one did this sooner. These chains might as well be butter,” Percival said, grunting with each clip of steel links.

Gwaine slapped him on one muscular arm. “To you, maybe, mate.”

The chains fell away. The door, however, refused to open even for Percival. Arthur and Gwaine joined him in tugging on it. Merlin attempted to help but Arthur waved him off with the snide remark about his twiggy arms being about as useful as a plastic straw. But the door finally gave way with a screech of rusting hinges, not by much but enough for all of them to squeeze through, even Percival. 

But what Merlin took to be another long hallway ended almost suddenly at another room, this one with a huge metal door. This time it took all of them to open it, their hands crowding each other on the door’s metal handle. The door groaned open and a gust of foul air smelling of mildew and rust puffed in their faces. 

Merlin stumbled back, gagging and coughing and not knowing why. Yes, the smell was unpleasant but he’d certainly smelled far worse in his life. 

Arthur scoffed in disgust. “Lords, Merlin, we’re not even in the heart of the place, yet. Could you at least show a little backbone?”

“Only when you… get your head out of… your ass,” Merlin coughed. 

Morgana moved over to him in concern and placed her hand on his back. “What is it, Merlin, do you sense something?”  
But Merlin shook his head, waving her off. “No. It was just the smell, I think.” Except that the coiling in his gut had tightened, ever-so-ill having grown to just plain ill, like having a thousand butterflies in his stomach with barely any room to flutter. 

There were two distinct sensations for Merlin when it came to sensing spirits. The first was a combination of being watched and being cold. The second, the feeling of an invisible hand wrapping around his chest and squeezing his ribs until he could barely breathe. If it was the former, then the spirit was mostly harmless. The latter, then the spirit was malevolent. 

But what Merlin was feeling now… the only time he had ever felt it was at the mental hospital, whenever one of the doctors came in and Merlin had yet to know what this doctor intended. Sometimes the visit was harmless, the doctor only wanting to ask questions. Most of the time, it was to fill him full of drugs or perform uncomfortable tests in the hopes of making him remember. They had been so hell bent on making him remember.

It wasn’t until several years later, when Gaius had gotten Merlin away from that place, that his mother had told him about the other children who had disappeared.

Merlin remembered not being alone.

“Merlin!” Arthur snapped.

Merlin jumped, nearly dropping his flashlight but fumbling with it until he caught it in a firm grip. He shined it on the door to see that the others had gone through, with Arthur still waiting, waving Merlin irritably onward. 

“Why Gaius thought you would be a help I have no idea. So far you’ve been nothing but useless,” Arthur said, giving Merlin a light shove through the door.

“And you’ve been nothing but a prat, but nothing new there,” Merlin said. 

The door brought them to a hallway going left and right, with another door across from them, this one hanging on its hinges. Gwaine peered inside, his light dancing off the walls of a small room, its only furnishings a rusty table.  
“Lovely,” he said. “Who wants to bet this is what we have to look forward to. Honestly, Pendragon, I don’t know what you hope to find, here. This place is gutted.”

“So were the other two places we went,” Arthur said. “And we still found information.”

“We found an address each time,” Gwaine said. “That’s not exactly information, that’s more like a scavenger hunt.”

“And scavenger hunts have a prize at the end,” Arthur countered waspishly. “Look, we’ve come this far and I’m not going to waste it. We’ll split up—“

“Yes, because that works so well in horror films,” Morgana said flatly.

Arthur gave her an equally flat stare. “Gwen, Morgana, you’re with Percival. Gwaine, you’re with me and Merlin.”

“Aww, why can’t I go with the girls? I can protect them just as good as Percy, here,” Gwaine whined.

Morgana crossed her arms and cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, but then who’ll protect you from us when you start running your mouth?”

Percival chuckled, and Gwaine punched him in the arm – not that Percival seemed to notice.

“That you can’t go two minutes without flirting is exactly why you’re coming with us,” Arthur said. “I don’t want to hear Morgana whining about it afterward.” 

“Only if I don’t have to hear you whine about how Gwaine won’t shut up and how useless Merlin is,” Morgana said. Then she smirked. “He can’t be that useless if you’re taking him instead of me.”

“I’m taking him because I don’t trust him not to talk some ghost into a haunting frenzy,” Arthur said, glaring at Merlin. Merlin glared right back.

“Besides, seeing as how you two have yet to sense anything, I doubt there’ll be much of a need for a medium.”

“I never said I didn’t sense anything,” Morgana said lightly. At Arthur’s wide-eyed and incredulous look, she huffed impatiently. “Look, sometimes what I sense isn’t always so cut and dry. We’re too early in for me to tell if I’m actually sensing something or if this place is just creeping me out.”

“But you think you sense something,” Arthur stated.

Morgana shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t know. As I said, it could just be this place creeping me out, except,” she furrowed her brow. “I don’t know. It’s like I want to leave. I mean, I have the desire to leave, but it’s like it’s not my desire. Which, yes, I know that doesn’t make any sense but it’s the only way I can describe it. It’s like this entire place is saturated with the need to leave, to just get the hell out. But it’s… old, distant, like an echo of a feeling. I’m sorry I can’t give you a better description.”

Arthur turned on Merlin, nearly blinding him with his torch. “And you, you getting anything?”

Merlin flinched back, slapping the flashlight aside. “Oi! What is this, an interrogation? She’s right, there is a feeling of… need-to-get-out.” He glanced over his shoulder, down the inky darkness of the hall. “Except it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from somewhere else. It feels like… like I’ve felt it before. But that could just be me, I guess.”

Merlin looked back at Arthur to see him roll his eyes.

“In other words, it’s because you’re being a girl about this.” Which earned Arthur a slap on the shoulder from both Morgana and Gwen.

Merlin, however, wasn’t paying too much attention, still pondering the creeping feeling of dread. He wanted to chalk it up merely to this place provoking bad memories of his time in the hospital, but while the need to leave was very much his own sentiment, as Morgana had said, it felt distant, like the memory of having felt this way once before. But the longer he was in this place, the more the feeling grew, and the more he desperately didn’t want to be here. But he’d made a promise to Gaius, and like hell he was turning tail to run and give Arthur another reason to call him useless. 

“Here,” Gwen said, pulling a packet of chalk from her pocket and holding it out for everyone to take one. “We’ll mark where we’ve been so we don’t get lost.”

“Ah, dear Gwen, always thinking ahead,” Gwaine said. 

“More like learning form past mistakes. Remember that mansion with all the stairs leading to nowhere and rooms inside rooms?” she said, and shuddered. “Lords, that was a mess.”

“So who takes what way?” Percival asked. He dug a coin from his pocket. “We can flip for it?”

Cold crept down Merlin’ spine like ice water. He glanced over his shoulder and saw, standing just barely visible down the hall behind him, the little girl in the white shift, staring at him as she often did.

“I want to go this way,” Merlin said, and didn’t wait for anyone to answer, knowing Arthur would only protest it since it was Merlin’s idea. As soon as he started moving down the right wing of the hall, the girl vanished. 

“Merlin!” Arthur griped. 

“Right’s as good as left, “Merlin said. “And I’ve got a feeling about his hall.” Because saying he had a feeling was easier than explaining a ghost girl who liked to follow him around and appear at random. 

Or maybe not so random. He could only hope the girl wasn’t steering him down some path of danger, but seeing as how she’d had plenty of opportunity to do him harm over the years, he highly doubted he was being misled. 

She had always been there since the day he had woken up, coming and going but never gone for long.

The hallway was concrete, cracked in places with puddles of water where moisture had leaked through. The doors weren’t many, few and far between, but the rooms on the other side were large. 

Gwaine was wrong. The place hadn’t been gutted. The first room they stepped through – its door still intact – was the cafeteria full of round faux wood tables and plastic blue chairs. There were plastic trays still on the tables, buried under black lumps of long rotten food. Next to one of the trays was a Walkman, still with a cassette inside. The next room they entered further down had been a suite of offices, the cubicles divided by molding partitions. The computers were the old, boxy things taking up most of the space on the desks. There were yellowed pages still on the desk top, the blackened remains of a snack – a bowl of pudding, maybe – and a small pot full of soil where a plant had once been. 

The place hadn’t been gutted. It had been quickly abandoned.

“Oh, I am not liking this,” Gwaine murmured. “If the next room we find is full of zombies, I’m gone.”

Arthur ignored him, going straight for the nearest filing cabinet and yanking hard on the rusted drawers. Merlin, wanting to get this over with, took another cabinet. But whatever secrets this place was hiding, it wasn’t in this particular office. The files were invoices, order forms and receipts for food and equipment.

Except Merlin was painfully acquainted with the equipment listed – gurneys, stretchers, restraints. Merlin flipped frantically through more files and found a thick one full of copied order forms for various medications, most of them psychotropic, some bloody illegal, like LSD. 

“What the hell were they doing here?” Merlin muttered, his voice quaking. He jumped when he felt a presence at his back, and jumped again to see Gwaine peering over his shoulder. 

Gwaine didn’t notice, too busy grimacing as he read what Merlin had just looked at.

“Either these blokes were having one hell of a stag party even I wouldn’t go to or—“

“Or my uncle was part of something the rest of the world wasn’t to know about,” Arthur said, heading toward Merlin and Gwaine with a thick folder in his hands. He tossed it on the desk, raising a cloud of dust, then gestured to it. “Look at that one.”

Merlin and Gwaine did. It was more order forms, this one for toys.

Toys. 

The tightness in Merlin’s gut coiled until he was certain he was going to be sick. Several quick swallows stopped it in his tracks, but now he felt cold, the chilled underground air crawling into his bones like an infection and staying there.

He wanted to get out. Needed to get out. Had to get out.

Merlin’s mind filled with darkness, and a metal cave.

A hand grasped Merlin’s shoulder. He gasped, spun around, and sighed in relief to see it was only Gwaine.

“Merlin, mate, you all right?” Gwaine said, worried. “I know pale tends to be your color but you’re looking downright peaky. You sensing something? Need a bit of air?”

Merlin, his heart easing out of its gallop, shook his head. “No, I’m fine. It’s just… it’s a creepy place, you know?” he said with a weak smile. 

Gwaine snorted. “That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.”

Arthur, however, had narrowed his eyes suspiciously. But instead of saying anything, moved on out of the room.  
The rest of the rooms were mirror images of each other, more offices full of more files telling an increasingly uncomfortable story, of potent medication, surgery tools, and an electro therapy machine. Then they came to the end of the hall, the final door opening to a stairwell winding deeper into the darkness. 

Gwaine sighed wearily. “Great. Because this place wasn’t feeling enough like something out of Resident Evil.”

“It’s stairs, Gwaine,” Arthur said shortly. “It probably leads to wherever they’ve been using all this medical equipment they’d been ordering.”

“Exactly. And medical equipment plus restraints plus drugs always equals sunshine and puppies.” Gwaine shook his head, smiling rigidly. “I swear if we end up opening some door and letting out some horror that ends up slaughtering the nearest village, I’m blaming you. If we survive, that is.”

“You know, Gwaine, I’m starting to suspect you’re an even bigger girl than Merlin, here,” Arthur said with a cold smile. “Isn’t that right, _Mer_ lin?”

Merlin was only half listening, being mostly preoccupied by the stale, thick air gusting up from the stairwell. He could have sworn… no, he was imagining things. He always did have a vivid imagination, his mum had said. Still, he was almost sure the air smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol, cleaner, and something burning.

Then Arthur gave him a shove in the back, enough to propel him onward if he didn’t want to trip down the stairs.  
“I stand corrected, you’re both very much girls,” Arthur said, snapping Merlin from his confusion and realizing that he should probably make a come-back if he wanted Arthur to stop prattling.

“I’m going to tell Morgana and Gwen you said that,” he said. “Then I’m going to tell them you screamed like a little child.”  
“Wait, when did I scream like a child?” Arthur said.

Merlin smirked. “You didn’t, but who do you think Morgana’s going to believe?”

“I’ll back him on it,” Gwain said. 

“Just… both of you shut up and keep moving,” Arthur said.

Merlin beamed in triumph.

The stairwell seemed endless, winding down and down, the air growing colder the deeper they went. 

Like being buried alive. 

Merlin, in the lead, shivered, but not from the cold. He didn’t want to go down there, where the smell of cleaner and alcohol and something burned was growing stronger. But if he so much as slowed, then Arthur would give him a light shove to keep him going. What felt like an eternity later, they reached the bottom of the stairs. 

There was only one door, streaked with rust.

Merlin chuckled nervously. “Seems a bit of an overkill to have so many steps just to get to one door.”

“Yeah,” Arthur said. He moved past Merlin to the door, and with one hard yanked, opened it on screeching hinges. Merlin followed after him. 

They were in another hall, dark as pitch where the torchlight didn’t shine. Merlin heard the door ease closed and click shut behind him.

Then he realized there were only two torch beams.

“Gwaine?” He said, turning around and around. He went back to the door, tried to push it open, but the bloody thing was stuck fast. “Gwaine? You out there?”

No answer.

Arthur soon joined him, grumbling about idiots with the attention span of a five year old on a sugar high. But it didn’t matter their combined efforts, the door refused to move.

Merlin backed away, chill after chill racing down his back. “That’s not right,” he muttered, mostly to himself. That door had opened easily only a moment ago, and Gwaine had been right behind them. Now he was gone.

Arthur kept shoving against the door. “Oh, don’t be such a bloody petticoat. He’s probably just having us on, idiot does it all the time. Gwaine! Open the damn door already. You’re going to make Merlin swoon if you don’t and you know I won’t let him live it down. Gwaine!”

Merlin glanced around, shining his light down either end of the hall hoping to spot Gwaine attempting to wander away on his own.

His light landed on a set of double doors five steps to the right. 

The same direction where the stink of cleaner, alcohol and burning was strongest. He didn’t know why he followed that smell, while it made his brain scream and his gut tighten until it hurt. He didn’t know why, when he stepped up to the doors, he pushed them open.

It was some sort of operating room, a hospital bed in the center and machines surrounding it – heart monitor, EKG machine, the electro-therapy machine, a tray with medical tools arrayed on the top. 

The tools were covered in fresh blood, the white cement floor splattered with it, the lab coats of the three doctors surrounding the bed striped with it. And writhing on the bed, screaming and sobbing and begging for a mum that wasn’t coming, a child… 

Then there was darkness, like the darkness of a metal tunnel.

~oOo~

Once upon a time…

Merlin made a friend while at the hospital. He didn’t know her name, since she couldn’t talk, but that was okay because she listened. She would wander into his room often, which Merlin was sure wasn’t allowed but he didn’t care. He got so lonely, sometimes, and having her there made him less scared. And when he told her about all the things the doctors did to him, it made him feel better, sometimes. 

Then one of the doctors came in while the girl was there. Merlin panicked, begging the doctor not to get her in trouble, promising that her being in the room was only an accident.

The doctor had looked at him funny.

He asked him who Merlin was talking about.

“The girl,” Merlin said, pointing at where she sat on the bed, watching them with empty gray eyes.

The Doctor, Merlin didn’t remember his name, frowned and shook his head.

“Merlin, lad, there’s no one there.”

Merlin saw other people like that – people who weren’t there. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they were nice, sometimes horrible. But the little girl was his favorite. He always felt safe with her, as though he had always known her.

~oOo~

“Merlin. Merlin! Wake up, damn it! Merlin!”

A slap and a sting to Merlin’s cheek, and he woke with a gasp, sucking in air as though he’d been holding his breath for too long. He opened his eyes to the room barely lit by his and Arthur’s torch, and Arthur’s face, sharp with shadows, hovering over him.

Arthur breathed out in relief. “Finally. Lords, Merlin, when I said you were going to swoon I didn’t mean for you to actually pass out. What is wrong with you?”

But Merlin ignored him, grabbing his torch and shoving past Arthur. He shined the light around the room, on the empty gurney, the rusting table, the toppled tray and the medical tools scattered across the floor. 

“There was… was something… here…” The memory of what he saw flashed in his mind as clearly as though it had just happened – the doctors, the machine, the screaming child and blood. Bile raced burning into Merlin’s throat and he doubled over, gagging and choking, tears streaming down his face.

“I – I c-can’t. I can’t!” he gasped, and scrambled on his hands and knees out of the room and into the hall. He threw himself against the wall where he huddled, shaking and gagging. He flinched when a warm hand settled on his back and rubbed.

“Merlin?” Arthur said, uncharacteristically gentle and kind. “Merlin, what is it you saw?”

But Merlin shook his head, the image repeating like a skipping record. He sucked in a ragged breath. 

“I can’t,” he whimpered. 

Arthur sighed heavily. “Okay, just… take your time, then. And make sure to breathe, in and out. You don’t have to say anything until you’re ready.” 

Merlin then felt Arthur shift and settle down beside him. Merlin did as told, focusing on both his breathing to get his heart to stop pounding like it was going to break through his ribs at any moment. But it didn’t matter how he breathed, or that his heart at least had stopped feeling on the verge of cardiac arrest. He couldn’t stop shaking.

And he didn’t care how it sounded, or what Arthur would think, when he said, “I need to get out of here.”

“Yes, well,” Arthur said, and not with his usual irritation but with what sounded like a modicum of regret. “Easier said than done. That door’s refusing to budge an inch and I nearly took my shoulder out trying. There might be another way out if whoever built this place had sense enough to put in emergency exits. But…”

“That means looking around some more,” Merlin said weakly. 

“Do you feel up to it?” Arthur asked. “I could go on ahead—“

“No!” Merlin yelped, flipping around to grab Arthur’s arm as if Arthur had been about to get up, which he wasn’t. “No, I’m fine. I can do this.”

“You sure?” Arthur said, and didn’t bother hiding the skepticism. 

“If it means getting out of here then hell yes,” Merlin said tremulously. But he needed help standing up, his legs shaky and weak. Arthur helped, much to Merlin’s surprise. But that Arthur had yet to say anything about petticoats or being girly was twice the surprise.

“Does Morgana get bad visions?” Merlin asked, being the only explanation as to why Arthur wasn’t using this to give him a hard time.

“Not bad enough for her to pass out,” Arthur said. “But she’s had some bad ones, yes.” Only when he was sure that Merlin would stay up did he let go of his arm. But Merlin was still shaking, the beam of his light convulsing over the floor. Merlin leaned against the wall, hoping to calm down some more.

“It was…” Merlin began, but when he thought about what he had seen, bile filled his throat. He closed his eyes, swallowing convulsively. 

“You don’t need to tell me right now,” Arthur said, still with that kindness that Merlin wasn’t used to where Arthur was concerned. 

Merlin nodded gratefully. “We can go, now,” he said.

They continued down the hall, heading right and away from the doors to the operating room. Merlin gripped his flashlight tight enough for his knuckles to blanch and the casing to creak. But it didn’t matter how tightly he held the thing, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. 

“It was so real,” his voice said, small and quivering. “What I saw. Most visions, they’re like dreams but this one… gods, it was so real. Like I was right there. I could…” He squeezed his eyes shut, gulping as he tried to force the image from his mind. “I could smell the blood.”

Arthur stopped, then turned to look at Merlin, concern and growing unease plain on his face. He clasped Merlin’s shoulder and opened his mouth, maybe to joke and ease the tension, maybe to offer words of comfort. Instead, his mouth snapped shut and he frowned as his hand moved from Merlin’s shoulder to his neck.

“Lords, Merlin, you’re like bloody ice.”

“What?” Merlin said, confused. He shouldn’t be cold, he did have his jacket and a long-sleeved shirt on. But then Arthur was shrugging out of his own jacket, and he draped it over Merlin’s shoulders.

“Did I almost die when I passed out? I’d think I was the last person you’d give your jacket to,” Merlin said.

“Yes, well,” Arthur said dismissively. “Gaius would kill me if you did die. Although this probably is nothing more than a matter of you not wearing enough layers. Is the whole gaunt look part of your ghost hunting repertoire or are you merely not a fan of eating?”

“My appetite’s fine. I just don’t like to gorge like some people I know,” Merlin said, pulling Arthur’s jacket tighter around his shoulders, but it did nothing against the cold that had sunk to his bone marrow.

“I do not gorge, I merely eat a more sensible amount, unlike some people I know,” Arthur said pointedly. “Come on, we need to keep going if we want to find a way out of here.”

As they went, they passed more double doors into more operating rooms, but Merlin refused to do more than glance at them. Each one they went by made him shiver harder, as if the rooms were alive and knew that he was there. But Arthur would look at them, and Merlin didn’t need to see his face to know he wanted to go into at least one and look around. 

“What is it my uncle was doing?” Arthur mumbled to himself.

“It was bad, whatever it was,” Merlin said. But when he tried again to tell Arthur what he had seen, his throat closed up.  
Arthur glanced back at him thoughtfully. “I’m starting to wonder if Gwaine hadn’t been too off about his Resident Evil remark,” he said. “Did your vision involve something being done to a person? Something medical?”

Merlin nodded.

Arthur heaved a breath, looking back to the way ahead. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. My mother must have seen it, in a vision or something. That’s why she went mad.”

“I can sympathize,” Merlin said, the sick feeling still heavy in his stomach.

Arthur turned his head to glare at him. “It’s not funny, _Mer_ lin.”

“I wasn’t being funny, _Ar_ thur. I’m serious. What I saw…” he whimpered, huddling deeper into the jacket. 

Arthur’s expression softened, first sympathetically, then sadly.

“It was a child,” Merlin finally blurted in a small, lost voice.

Arthur’s expression tightened in horror. 

“Your mother must have seen it, over and over, and more of it. It would drive anyone mad.” Merlin looked at Arthur kindly. “I’m sorry, Arthur.”

Arthur merely nodded, then focused on their path. 

“What was my uncle researching?” Arthur asked, but from the distant sound of his voice, it was a rhetorical question.

“I don’t think I want to know,” Merlin answered, anyway. The vision, the fright that resulted from it, and the cold seemed to have joined forces with the intent of giving him a headache. His skull was pounding to the beat of his heart, and his heart was beating uncomfortably fast. 

The distant feeling of leave-right-now was also no longer distant. It was a need that raced through his veins, imbuing him down to his cells, as if it wasn’t merely a need but something that was a part of him – a deep instinct that had once been dormant and now was waking up. He had to leave. So much depended on it…

“Merlin?"

Merlin flinched from his meandering thoughts. Arthur was looking back at him, and looking worried again.

“Are you all right?” Arthur asked.

“Not really,” Merlin said, since now was not the time to save face and hold back. 

“Is it anything you can tell me about? Are we in any danger?”

Merlin shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I want to leave. I feel like I have to leave and get away, but not just because of some danger coming my way. It’s like I have to be somewhere or get somewhere as soon as possible.” He closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose in tired frustration. “I don’t understand what it is this place is trying to tell me. It’s all so bloody muddled.”

“Story of your life, I’d imagine,” Arthur said. When Merlin looked up to glower at him, it was to see Arthur looking back with a smirk on his face and a spark of mirth in his eyes. 

But Merlin couldn’t bring himself to take the bait that was Arthur’s attempt at lightening the mood. 

“You know, for someone who’s so certain I’m a fake you’re taking my abilities incredibly serious.”

Arthur shrugged, trying to be nonchalant but the slight hunch of his shoulders betraying his mild unease. 

“I… may go a little overboard with claiming you to be a fake, I’ll admit. But even you have to admit that your record when it comes to clearing a dwelling of its spirits is rather… perfect, not to mention quick. I mean, you don’t even do any bloody research! At least not much according to Gaius’ case files. And it bothers me, all right? It bothers me that you’re so bloody good and quick about these things while the rest of us are mostly stumbling around the dark. It used to worry me that maybe you were faking it for the sake of prestige, even though Gaius always swore to me that wasn’t the case. You’re too good, Merlin, and you know what they say about something being too good to be true.”

Merlin rubbed at his aching head. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not faking it, that’s for damn certain. It’s not even like I want this ability. I didn’t even have this ability until…” he bit off his own words, realizing too late that he was already saying too much.

Arthur stopped, stood there for a silent heartbeat, and then slowly turned to Merlin. “I know you went missing for a year,” he said.

Merlin stared at him wide-eyed. “What? How? My name was never in the papers…”

“Not when you were found, but it was when you went missing. I found the article in one of the drawers of my dad’s desk while I was looking for information on my mum.” 

Merlin smiled. “Let me guess – without his permission.”

Arthur chuckled. “I had waited until he was away on business, yes. I’d asked him about it… telling him I’d stumbled across it while doing some research on the computer, of course. Did you know my father aided the search for you? I guess because Gaius was your uncle and his friend and all. He said you were found a year later, but didn’t say much else about it after that. Neither was there anything more to find on the subject.”

Arthur shifted uncomfortably. “We both know the tales of dramatic experiences waking latent abilities within a person. After that, I kind of, sort of, stopped wondering if you might be a fake.” He gave Merlin a tentative but curious look. “What did happen, if you don’t mind my asking? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”

Merlin shrugged. “There’s nothing to answer. I don’t remember any of it.”

Both of Arthur’s eyebrows climbed high up his forehead. “Nothing at all?”

“Just… feelings, and flashes in dreams, sometimes. But not much else.”

“Gods,” Arthur breathed in horror. “Then you come back and suddenly you’re seeing dead people. That must have been lovely.”

“It was a bit of a shocker, yeah.”

Arthur shook his head, part in amazement, part disconcerted. “Our lives really are the stuff of horror stories, aren’t they?”  
“I try not to think about it too much,” Merlin said.

Arthur nodded. “Good idea.” He then looked around. “You know, maybe it’s just me but I feel like we’ve been walking for bloody ever.” When his light flashed through the open doors of another operating room, Merlin flinched hard, his blood screaming in his ears. His head pounded harder, and for a moment the room wavered. He slumped against the wall, pulling Arthur’s jacket tighter around him as he breathed through both the dizziness and his increased shaking.

His eyes wandered, as if on their own, to the operating room. He saw a doctor leaving the room, a small bundle wrapped in a bloody sheet in his arms. The screams and wails of children echoed down the hall, the sound piercing his skull like a lance. Merlin cried out, dropping to the floor and pressing his hands to his ears but the sound pushed through as if it wasn’t from outside his head he was hearing it, but from inside.

And then there was darkness, the thump and rattle of the metal cave, and the cries and wails following him. 

“Merlin!” 

Merlin snapped his eyes open and met Arthur’s terrified gaze. 

Merlin blinked twice, and tears chased each other down his face. 

“Arthur?” he whimpered. “Arthur, please, I need to leave. I need to get out, please.”

Arthur nodded, gaping. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll get you out, I will, but we have to keep moving. Can you stand?”

Merlin nodded, but once again needed help climbing on shaking legs to his feet. He kept himself pressed to the wall, both for the support and to stay as far from the operating rooms as possible. 

“Come on,” Arthur said, and as though sensing Merlin’s issues with the rooms, placed himself between Merlin and the doors, one hand on Merlin’s arm as they continued forward. 

They finally came to where the hallway turned, going left. There were more doors down this hallway, not leading to operating rooms but to regular rooms, with beds covered in yellowed and rumbled sheets, rust stained sinks in one corner and a filthy toilets in the other corner.

In some of the rooms were children’s toys – balls, dolls, blocks, trucks, plastic dinosaurs. Merlin saw all this when Arthur would shine his light through the small observation windows. 

Merlin also saw, through the window of one of the middle rooms on his right, a plastic toy dragon. 

“Arthur, wait,” Merlin said. It was strange. He wanted that dragon. He’d always liked toy dragons, yes, but for reasons he couldn’t explain the sight of the filthy and stained dragon lying on the concrete floor had woken his inner child with a vengeance, and now that child wanted that dragon and refused to leave without it. 

Merlin entered the room. He picked up the dragon, and wiped a streak of grime away revealing a gold and copper plastic hide underneath. 

“Merlin?”

Merlin smiled. He didn’t know why he was smiling, why he felt calm, and it should have frightened him, but with the dragon in his hands it was as though nothing in the world would hurt him ever again. 

“Merlin.”

He was safe, now. He had his dragon.

“Merlin, I need you to put that toy down and leave that room. Please.”

Merlin’s eyelids fluttered, and he felt like a man waking from a dream. Because Arthur had never, ever said “please” to him.  
Merlin looked at Arthur, but Arthur wasn’t looking at Merlin. He was looking at the wall next to the door, his eyes wide, confused, filled with terror.

“Merlin. Now. Leave that room now.”

Merlin did as he was told, still feeling partly caught in a dream. He stepped out of the room and looked at whatever it was that had Arthur at once both riveted and horrified. 

It was a tag. And written on that tag was a name.

Merlin. 

Merlin’s smile faded. He blinked once, twice, but the name never changed.

His name.

It’s a common name, his brain screamed. He wasn’t the only Merlin in the world. The name wasn’t unique.

Except it was. Everyone who had heard his name always said so. The kids at school had loved making fun of him for it, because no one gave their kid a weird name like Merlin. 

A coincidence, an accident, a trick, he was reading it wrong, it was dark and his brain was muddled. It meant nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing. 

“Merlin?” Arthur said, looking at him as though he was the one with the answer to why they were seeing his name in a place he had never been to. 

But you have been here.

Merlin tore his gaze away from the tag with his name on it. He saw, deeper down the hall, barely visible against the dark, the girl in the white shift. 

You have been here, his mind said. But it wasn’t his voice. It was the voice of a child. Of a little girl. 

The girl took off down the hall, which wasn’t right. She had never run from him before. Merlin took off after her.

“Merlin!” Arthur shouted, but Merlin didn’t hear him. He didn’t hear anything but the gentle whispers of a child.

~oOo~

Once upon a time, Merlin took a short cut through the woods as he always did when he went to go see his friend Will. He was half way there – he knew because he had reached the old dead tree with the twisted trunk that made it look like white taffy – and stopped when he saw a little girl in a white dress sitting at the base of the trunk.

She was crying. 

Curious, Merlin moved toward her. He stepped on a twig, and the snap was like a shot. The girl looked up, and with wide eyes waved him away.

“Go. Go, you need to go, please,” she said frantically.

Merlin never had a chance to ask why. A man stepped out from behind the tree, tall with a pale face and dark, oily hair. He smiled as though he had found himself a giant pile of candy.

“What have we here?” he said. He looked at the little girl. “Is he the special one you were sensing? Don’t lie to me, now. You know what happens when you lie.”

The girl said and did nothing, not at first. The man moved toward her, put his hand on her small shoulder, and when he squeezed hard enough to make her flinch, she nodded.

The man chuckled. “Good. Can you make him sleep? You’ll have a new friend if you do.”

The girl cried harder, tears running fast down her face. She looked at Merlin. 

Then there was darkness.

Then the terrible things.

~oOo~

Merlin ran deeper into the darkness, following the girl, the screams and sobs of children all around him and a vaguely familiar voice bellowing his name chasing him. Images flashed through his brain, piercing his skull like an arrow and making him cry out in agony and clutch his head, but he never stopped running. Images of operating rooms, and machines, and doctors in blood-spattered gowns standing over him; of needles being slid into his arms and pills shoved down his throat; of sticky pads pressed to the side of his head and his chest, and the heart monitor beeping to the pace of his racing little heart.

And there were always the screams, the sobs, the pleas to go home, to see mummy and daddy again. But no, they couldn’t go. They were special, and they were going to be more special. They could never go home.

Merlin ran, and the longer he ran, the louder the cries of despair became until he had to cover his ears. They were begging. They were begging and he had to help them. Had to save them.

The children could never leave.

They were special.

An image. A room, concrete and solid with only an air vent, and a door of thick, solid metal. The children were gathered inside, the older ones pale and angry, as though they knew something the smaller ones didn’t. 

The dark haired man, looking frantic, hurried the doctors along as they put one child after another into the room.

“Hurry, hurry!” he hissed. He smiled tremulously at the children already inside. “It’s… it’s all right. It’s just for a little while, for your safety. Then you can come out and play for as long as you want.”

The smaller children were quite excited about this. The older children frowned even more, glaring at the man with dark hair. 

The girl in the white shift with the brown hair, who had found Merlin in the woods, looked at him with tears in her eyes.  
“Something bad’s going to happen,” she said. “Really, really bad.”

When all the children were in the room, and just when the man with black hair was about to step out, the older children with pale faces and angry eyes suddenly surrounded him, blocking his way. The door began to shut, but not because the doctors outside were closing it. On the contrary – they were trying to pull it back open.

“No, please, it’s just for a little while, I swear,” the black haired man said.

The older children said as one, “Liar.” 

The younger children watched expectantly, saying nothing.

The girl in the shift looked at Merlin, then took his hand in hers. She pulled him to the wall where the vent was. One of the older, taller children looked at the vent, and its cover fell away.

“You should go, Merlin,” he girl said. “They didn’t have long enough to make you like us. You should go and get help if you can, but it’s okay if you can’t. It’s probably better if you don’t. It’s too late.”

Merlin wanted to ask what was too late, but another of the older children lifted him into the vent. He crawled inside, in the dark, like a metal cave.

“Go,” said the girl. “You need to get out.”

So Merlin crawled and crawled, knowing only that he needed to get out.

The dark-haired man’s scream echoed after him, long and loud and inhuman. As if he were being torn apart.  
Merlin crawled. 

Merlin ran, the girl always too many steps ahead. 

Then she stopped, but only long enough to slip through a door Merlin couldn’t quite make out it in the darkness, it still too far away. Merlin ran faster, then slowed, then stopped.

He stood in front of a huge, thick metal door, streaked with rust. It was open just enough for Merlin’s thin body to squeeze through, so he did. 

The room was concrete, and seemed empty at first, until Merlin lifted his light toward the back. The light flashed off dozens of white shifts and pale faces, and Merlin froze. His breath caught in his lungs, and his heart seemed to stop. The pale faces stared at him with vacant eyes. The girl in the white shift stood in front of them, her hands clasped behind her back.

They were still here. Gods, they were still in this place!

Merlin fell to his knees, his hand going to his mouth when a sob escaped his throat.

“I’m sorry,” he choked. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to forget you, I’m so sorry.”

The little girl moved to him, then knelt in front of him, putting her hand on his shoulder. 

“You didn’t,” she said. “You found us. You saved us.”

The children shifted, then one by one made their away around Merlin and out the door, vanishing into the dark, until only Merlin and the girl were left. She touched the side of his face and smiled brightly.

“Live your life, Merlin,” she said. “And be at peace.”

Then she, too, left the room. 

Merlin remained kneeling on the floor, staring into the dark on the other side of the room. He saw something there, a shape, maybe a child who hadn’t left yet. He lifted his light to see better, and screamed.

The dark-hair man was there, but only his hand reaching for nothing, and his face frozen in horror, the rest of him embedded into the wall. 

Merlin screamed and screamed and then blacked out.

~oOo~

“Merlin! Merlin, damn it, open your eyes! Merlin!”

Merlin’s eyes snapped open, his lungs filled frantically with air, and he released that air on a scream, scrabbling and clawing at whatever it was gripping his shoulders. 

“Merlin, stop! It’s me, Arthur! Calm down, damn it!”

But Merlin kept screaming, scrabbling and clawing, trying to get away. Arthur grabbed both his wrists and pinned them together, then sat on his frantically kicking legs. 

“Damn it, Merlin, stop! You’re going to hurt yourself! You’re all right, please listen to me!”

Merlin was listening, but all he could see was the dark-haired man’s head and hand encased in the wall, terror and pain unlike anything Merlin had ever seen frozen on his face. 

Arthur’s flashlight, having been abandoned on the floor, was rocking back and forth, its beam flashing off of a collection of something white, like sticks. Merlin lifted his eyes past Arthur’s shoulder.

“Merlin, no, don’t look!” But it was too late. Merlin saw it – the small skeletons scattered on the floor, their arms reaching out to the wall. Embedded in the wall was half a skull and a fleshless hand, the skull’s jaw gaping. Merlin’s screams broke into harsh sobbing, his lungs heaving and his ribs convulsing as he fought to get air. 

Then Merlin pitched to the side and vomited.

“Damn it all!” Arthur snarled. He grabbed his light, gathered Merlin into his arms as though he weighed no more than a child, and ran from the room and down the hall. Merlin watched as the pile of bones vanished, swallowed by the dark.  
“Gwaine!” Merlin heard Arthur call, but it was like his voice was in the distance. All sound was in the distance.

“Gwaine, where the hell have you been?!”

“Where’ve I been? Where the hell have you two been? You went ahead of me on the stairs and vanished then I couldn’t get the door open… Gods, what happened to Merlin?”

“I don’t know. We need to go him out of here. Where’s the way we came in?”

“This way, come on.”

Merlin didn’t know how long they were running, or even where they were in the bunker. All that existed were the images in his head: doctors with blood-spattered gowns, machines, needles, a concrete room, and an endless metal tunnel filled with the screams of a dying man.

~oOo~

Once upon a time, Merlin crawled through a tunnel of metal, following a distant light. He came to the end, and pushed and shoved and kicked against the grate until his hands and feet bled and the grate came free. It was a long way to the floor, but he had to keep going. He had to get out. He climbed out carefully, hanging onto the edge of the vent, and when the fall wasn’t so far, he dropped the rest of the way.

He was in the hallway, the one with the medical rooms. The lights were flickering, the doors were open, but no one was there. Merlin ran quickly leaving bloody footprints. He had to hurry if he didn’t want to get caught. He found a door with some stairs and followed them all the way to the top. It led to another hall, this one full of doors to rooms full of desks, but still no one was there. He looked through many doors and tried many rooms hoping one would lead him to a way out.  
Then he found it, a door leading to another door leading to light. He followed that light, and stepped out into a forest. He looked up and smiled to see the sky, big and blue and clear. He breathed in deeply, filling his lungs with wood-scent and the smell of moss and wet earth. 

But he couldn’t enjoy it, not with the others trapped, not with the man screaming and screaming, the noise filling Merlin’s head. Merlin ran as fast as he could, ignoring the way his feet stung and his lungs burned. He ran as far as he could, for as long as he could, until he stumbled onto a road. That’s when his body decided it had had enough, and he crumpled to the ground.

~oOo~

“That is strange, just strange. We never thought much of anything about the place, to be honest. I had a grandda who remembers when it was built, back during the war. Wasn’t much of a place, then, but he does remember folks coming and doing some kind of construction on it. I mean, we assumed it was some kind of military thing, maybe where they were testing weapons, so we never thought much of it. Not that we could have – no one ever could get that second door open. Funny, that.”

Merlin took a breath, and forced his sticky eyelids to part. His nose filled with a chemical stench so painfully familiar to him that it made his heart speed up, and racing with it was the beeping of a machine.

Merlin’s eyes widened. His breathing increased. With each heaving expansion of his ribcage, he felt the pull of sticky pads on his skin, and the chafing of a plastic tube against his nose. He blinked up at a white ceiling, then he turned his head to see a heart monitor.

Merlin snapped upright, a scream catching in his throat and making him choke. Suddenly hands were on him trying to push him back down. He fought them, pushing them away as best he could but his arms were about as effective as wet noodles, his body feeling as though it were made of brick. 

“Merlin, Merlin, please! Stop!” 

Merlin knew that voice, and the familiarity of it made him freeze just long enough for a pair of familiar arms to wrap around him – not to restrain him. He knew painfully well when he was being restrained – but in an embrace, and one he knew as well as the voice begging him to calm down.

“Mum?” he whimpered.

“Yes, love. I’m here, I’m right here.” She began rocking him back and forth, and Merlin closed his eyes and more than gladly lost himself into the rhythm. 

“Is everything all right?” a new voice asked. 

Merlin opened his eyes, and in doing so realized his mum wasn’t the only one in the room. There were two police officers, a man in a suit, Gaius…

And a doctor.

But Merlin didn’t see a friendly doctor with a clipboard in one hand and a worried look on his face. He saw blood spattered on his coat and a syringe in his hand; one image trying to superimpose over the other and cracking reality in between, and Merlin shrank shaking against his mother, clinging to her with whatever strength he had left, his breaths fast and quaking like his body.

“No, no, no, no, no, go away, go away, please go away, go away, don’t, please don’t please don’t…” he said, and kept saying over the reassurances of his mother. He heard, distantly, the doctor say something about needing to get Merlin to calm down, then Gaius say how everything was going to be all right and that Merlin needed to focus on his breathing before he passed out. There was Gaius on one side, rubbing his back, his mum on the other, and the officers and man in the suit being ushered out by the doctor. A nurse eventually arrived carrying a syringe that she handed to the doctor. When the doctor came toward Merlin, the syringe at the ready, Merlin screamed until he blacked out. 

The next time he woke, his body was still heavy, his limbs still limp noodles, but his head was clearer, and his mum and Gaius were still there. But it wasn’t any better, because it didn’t matter that the doctor’s gown was blood-free and he didn’t carry a syringe, Merlin’s heart rate still spiked and he would start to shake when the man came anywhere near him, still flinch whenever the man would perform even the most simple exam. 

It became the story of his life the two days he was in the hospital. Merlin hadn’t been injured, but whatever he’d suffered down in the bunker, it had resulted in heart palpitations and acute stress (he’d had a bleeding nose and was barely breathing when Arthur had brought him in), and the doctor wanted to keep an eye on him. When the two officers who had been in the room the first time Merlin had woken up returned, Merlin nearly had another panic attack, being half asleep and certain that whatever he said would only land him back in the mental hospital. The man in the suit who had also been there was a historian and quite eager to hear what Merlin had to say about the bunker. Merlin wanted nothing to do with him.

The doctor released Merlin on the third day, figuring his heart was going to be just fine and he was better off healing at home, far from the hospital and the anxiety it was causing him. Merlin doubted he would ever step foot in a hospital of his own free will ever again. 

The moment he was home in his room at Gaius’ flat, he went straight to bed sometime around twelve in the afternoon and didn’t wake until the next day. Not seeing the girl standing in the corner as she always had made him want to cry, but he swallowed it back, rolled out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen. It was nearing lunch, but Gaius was stirring a pot of oatmeal. He smiled when Merlin emerged still looking half asleep and bedraggled in his T-shirt and sweats.

“Good to see you’ve gotten the rest you needed,” Gaius said. “I’m making oatmeal, which I know is all you’ll be up for. Don’t think I hadn’t noticed how little you ate while in the hospital.”

“Wasn’t hungry,” Merlin said quietly, settling himself on a stool in front of the kitchen island. 

Gaius said nothing, merely nodded his understanding, then scooped oatmeal into a bowl, adding a bit of milk and honey and setting it in front of Merlin. 

Halfway through his lunch slash breakfast, there was a knock at the door. Merlin was still not quite awake enough to care who it was and what they wanted, until he heard Gaius open the door and Arthur’s voice follow. 

“As you can see, he’s awake,” Gaius said as he led Arthur into the kitchen. “But he’s still recovering and if I so much as here him cry out in alarm I’m dragging you out of here by your ears, Arthur Pendragon. Now would you like some lunch? There’s a bit of oatmeal left.”

Merlin managed a small smile at that. 

“No, I’m fine,” Arthur said, seating himself on the other side of the island. 

Gaius nodded. “Then I’ll leave you two to it.” He then shuffled down the hall and into his office next to his room. 

“Doing all right?” Arthur asked.

Merlin shrugged. “I think I may have a phobia of hospitals,” he said. 

Arthur winced. “After what happened, I’m not surprised.” He then eyed Merlin uncertainly, uncomfortably. He shifted on the stool, then clasped his hands on the top of the island. 

Merlin recognized the actions for what they were, and spared Arthur the arduous task of jumping into a topic neither one of them felt ready to broach, but would have to eventually.

“Looks like we caused quite the uproar with what we found,” he said. 

Arthur chuckled tightly. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it. Wait until you get on the Internet. There’s already three indie games based on the bloody place, and five theories about want went on. The arguments over whether it was a hoax are getting quite heated, in fact.”

Merlin looked at Arthur in both confusion and trepidation. “You posted what we found on the internet?”

Arthur nodded soberly. “In the hopes of maybe gathering more information. Your name excluded, of course. I didn’t think you’d appreciate our fellow ghost hunters knocking on your door at all hours for an interview on something you’d rather forget.” He looked down at his hands. “I know. I’m not a fan of shouting my research to the world when I don’t have all the facts, either. But…” He scraped his hand through his hair. Then swallowed, his face paling. “The… remains, in the wall of that room. They… they’re my uncles.”

Merlin’s eyes rounded over.

“We found out through a dental match,” Arthur said, his voice shaking. He looked up at Merlin, his eyes wide and imploring. “Merlin, do you… you don’t have to answer if you don’t feel ready, but do you remember anything? About that… that place?”  
Merlin shuddered, putting down his spoon then scrubbing the side of his face wearily.

“You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want,” Arthur said gently.

Merlin shook his head. “I remember more than I did, but it just leads to more questions. I know they were doing experiments. But I can’t tell you what kind.”

“I’m sure I could theorize. We have my uncle who specialized in the more mysterious portions of the brain, we have the one survivor who couldn’t see ghosts and then could, and we have… well, had, it’s been cleared out now – but had a room full bones facing a wall with my uncle trapped inside.” Now Arthur was the one to shudder. “Whatever files they had on their research they must have taken or destroyed, but it adds up plainly enough. They were obviously doing something to enhance those children - mentally, physically, maybe both. They went too far with whatever they were doing, and things went to hell, literally.”

Merlin nodded. “Makes sense.”

Arthur studied Merlin thoughtfully. “Did other children escape? If we could find them—“

“No,” Merlin said sadly. “No, just me.”

“Oh,” Arthur said.

Merlin picked up his spoon, and returned to swirling his oatmeal into a whirlpool. “I don’t know why,” he said. He frowned when he thought back on it, and this time when he shivered it was a moment before he could stop.

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Merlin, I said you didn’t have to talk about it—“

“I need to,” Merlin cut in. “I need to understand it, or at least what I can of it. I… it was like… like I wasn’t complete. 

Whatever it was they were doing to us, I was the most recent, or the last one, because whatever they had done to the other children they hadn’t done to me. But what the hell does that even mean? Why could I leave but the others feel they couldn’t? What was done to them that they decided it was better to die trapped and…?” He closed his eyes when his mind filled with the echoing screams of Agravaine. Those inhuman, impossible screams. 

“What the hell was being done to us?” he whispered. 

“Terrible things,” Arthur said. “Impossible things. Things they didn’t want the world to know about. Things that they ran from and left to die because they went too far. Do you know we haven’t found one bloody thing on that bunker? Not one. Even my father’s gotten involved pulling what strings he can. We have the information on the net with not only a request for someone to come forward with information but even a reward, but no one has. At least not anyone with anything legit to say. This project, whatever it was, it wasn’t just covered up it was buried and burned. It’s a bloody miracle the bloody bunker was even still intact.”

Then Arthur narrowed his eyes. “Unless it wasn’t.”

“It was meant to be found,” Merlin said, nodding. “I think, mostly, so people would know that something had happened. I don’t think what happened matters as much as that it did happen. Like those kids. I wasn’t meant to save them, just release them so they could move on, I guess.”

“So you don’t think we’ll ever know what happened.” Arthur leaned forward. “Doesn’t that bother you, Merlin? This happened to you. Whatever was done to those kids was being done to you. Doesn’t that make you angry? Don’t you want to know the truth?”

“I know the truth,” Merlin said. “I know what happened to me.”

“But you don’t know why.”

“Why doesn’t matter anymore. Whatever it was, it’s over.”

“And if it happens again? If someone else gets it into their head that there’s no harm in experimenting on children?”  
“Then those people will hopefully hear a story about a facility abandoned, a room full of dead kids and a man in a wall, and think twice before they think there’s no harm in repeating history.”

“I hope you’re right,” Arthur said.

“So do I,” said Merlin. “As for what happened to me, I’m going to put it behind me and I’m going to move on. Obviously I was meant to live, so I damn well am going to live.”

Arthur grinned. “Good attitude to have.”

“I owe it to the others,” Merlin said. “Since they felt they couldn’t leave, I don’t know why.” He looked at Arthur. “What about their families? Have they been contacted?” 

“Those that have families, yes. We think some of them may have been orphans, and that either the method used to obtain them wasn’t working or wasn’t fast enough so they resorted to kidnapping.”

Merlin furrowed his brow and frowned. “I remember… when I was taken. There was a girl, and your uncle. He had said something about me being special or… something. Maybe they were after a certain kind of child. Maybe ones with a unique brain or dormant gifts or…. I don’t know. I just remember your uncle was using one of the children to find other children.”  
“And, what, these kids were okay with that?” Arthur asked.

“No,” Merlin said easily. “No, they weren’t. They felt they didn’t have a choice. The girl was the one who said I needed to leave. She and the others helped me escape. And not even so I could bloody save them. Just so one of us could live to… to… reveal what happened or free their souls or just so it could be said that someone survived, someone who knows, even if they don’t know it clearly. Or maybe just because, I don’t know, but because of her and the others I’m alive. So, no, those kids were never okay with it.”

Arthur held up his hands, patting the air. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”

“I know,” Merlin sighed. He shook his head. “I don’t even know her name. The girl’s, I mean. The one who found me and helped me leave. Or if I did know it, I forgot it.”

“Actually,” Arthur said, pulling a piece of folded paper from the pocket of his jacket. “I managed to get a list of the names on all those doors while I was helping the police find that room.” He slid the paper to Merlin. “Maybe it might spark a good memory.”

Merlin took the paper, unfolded it and read through the list of names. 

“Freya,” Merlin said, when he reached the name and the brown-haired girl in the white shift popped into his head. But it wasn’t the image of a pale girl with sad eyes, but of someone healthier, and although not happier, still smiling shyly.  
Merlin looked up hopefully. “Do you know if she’s one of the ones with a family?”

Arthur’s smile fell. “I don’t know. What I do know my father was able to find out, but even he has his limits. But there’s more than one way to find out. I’m sure we can discover something if we look into it.”

“Thank you,” Merlin said. “Really.”

Arthur shrugged. “It might give her family some peace of mind knowing she wasn’t alone.”

Merlin continued reading through the names to see if any more of them stood out, but they didn’t. 

“It’s funny,” he said. “Not in a laughing way, of course but… still funny that this was your quest, but what we found were my answers, if they could be called answers.”

Arthur pressed his lips into a thin line. “I don’t think I want to know anymore, to be honest.”

Merlin looked up in surprise. “Even if it means proving your mum wasn’t mad?”

“She wasn’t,” Arthur said. “I’ve proved that much to myself at least, and, really, I think that’s all that had ever mattered. The rest… what she saw…” he shook his head. “Considering what it had done to her, I don’t want to know. I know enough just having seen what became of my uncle. The rest isn’t meant to be known. Let it stay buried, I say.”

Arthur stood, readying to leave, but before he was on the other side of the island, he back tracked to the stool but didn’t sit down. 

“Oh, one more thing. Since you’ve proved yourself rather spectacularly not to be the incompetent hack of a medium I thought you were, feel free to phone my team and I should you need our expertise.”

“Um, actually,” Merlin said with a small grin. “Shouldn’t you be the one phoning me for my expertise? You know, seeing as how I’m the one who can talk directly to ghosts and everything.”

Arthur stared at him for a moment. Then, “I’ll think about it,” he said. He continued on his way to the door, clapping Merlin on the shoulder in passing.

Merlin snorted out a laugh, and finished his oatmeal.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Thank goodness this was my prompt, because it kept giving me all kinds of grief. I had a completely different plot in mind than what I had written, but a plot my muse, apparently, wanted nothing to do with. In fact I was getting worried I wouldn't have anything to post. But after smacking the plot bunnies around for a bit, they finally coughed up another idea, one I wasn't entirely happy with but that I at least enjoyed writing where the creepy bits and panicking Merlin were concerned ;)
> 
> I also apologize for any formatting issues - namely any paragraphs running together that I may have missed. Things got a little wonky when I transferred the story onto AO3.


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